Learning to Photograph - Volume 2

06

Color and Black-and-White

With every exposure, you have the choice of introducing color or limiting yourself to the gray tones of a black-and-white image. In the age of digital photography, you don’t have to make this decision before you take a photograph, nor does your decision necessarily impact the next 36 images you will capture. But the decision itself is just as important now as it was before. The choice to include or exclude color influences the overall effect of the image design. When you shoot in black-and-white, all colors are reduced to their brightness values, which tend to bring the graphic qualities of the subject into the foreground. Designing in black-and-white, in other words, means being able to think in gray scale before ...